Read Schuim en asch in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Schuim en asch by J. Slauerhoff was first published in 1930. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 41,600 words.

Coffins that knock in the hold at night. Opium-hazed ports and pirate junks. Five tales from the far edges of the world.

J. Slauerhoff sailed the oceans as a ship's doctor, and in Foam and Ashes (1930) he sends his restless, lonely characters to the farthest corners of the map. In “The Heir”, Hassein, a poor harbour clerk in Basra, prays to Allah for riches — and one morning learns that his godless old uncle has died without a will.

In “The Last Voyage of the Nyborg”, an ugly four-masted barque slips out through the Golden Gate with its holds nailed shut, stacked with coffins marked in Chinese characters. That first night, something below begins to knock. Other stories follow a sailor who keeps finding and losing the same woman, and two gaunt foreigners racing motorboats across a Chinese bay where pirates still sail.

Dark, sensual and full of salt air: Slauerhoff at his finest, and a fixture of the Dutch canon.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Dutch book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.